Now that the Nortel-Avaya deal has officially closed and the product road map is released, its time for Nortel partners to move past denial and anger and onto the next stages of grief (though I guess the bargaining is already done with, huh?).
Elite Nortel partner Stuart Chandler, president and CEO of Jessup, Md.-based Optivor Technologies ( who purchased avayanortel.com early on as a redirect for his site, which makes me wonder if he has some lottery numbers to suggest, too), is well on his way to Acceptance.
“Everybody in this business has drank the Kool-Aid so many times, and they’re just burned out [by] ‘the next greatest thing’ and ‘who’s going to save everybody?’ Avaya comes in and we’re like, ‘Here we go again,’” Chandler told me last week.
“But let me tell you — Avaya came in with a no-B.S. strategy, and all these senior telecom folks whom I have great respect for … started buying into the Avaya plan,” he added. “I’ve not heard one negative thing from the former Nortel [partners and customers].”
It’s a surprising turnaround for a Nortel partner, who are traditionally a fiercely loyal bunch. Take this story from late 2008 — when Juniper Networks had attempted to poach Nortel partners. Here’s what Chandler told then-senior news writer (now SearchNetworking.com editor) Rivka Little:
And, yes, he knows he’s eating his words.
“I swore I wasn’t going to drink the Kool-Aid again, and here I am,” Chandler said last week. “A year ago, I didn’t want to think about Avaya … but right now, it’s full speed ahead.”
Obviously, this is just one partner’s perspective. Got another?
For the complete article, follow this link:
Privately held Avaya could be preparing to go public once again.
Avaya traded on Wall Street before being bought out by private equity firms TPG Capital and Silver Lake in 2007. Now, less than three years later, and with bankrupt Nortel assets and 6,000 former Nortel workers in the ranks, the time may be near for an Avaya IPO.
That’s according to the Financial Times. The paper quoted Todd Abbott, senior vice president of global sales and marketing, recently as saying Avaya will monitor market conditions and is open to an IPO in the next few years.
We will start with the Avaya-Nortel integration first, and comment on the new entrants and their potential impact in the next issue.
Impact of Avaya-Nortel consolidation....Bigger than Y2K for telecom and contact centre
The Avaya purchase of Nortel Enterprise Business Division.......................
This announcement forces all Avaya and Nortel users to analyze their long term business requirements and their current telecom, network and contact centre infrastructures in order to determine their alternatives and investment requirements for the future. The high level considerations and choices are outlined below.
Many customers will face an increase in upgrade and support/maintenance costs if their environment is not on current Nortel versions or platforms, or the customer is not on a dedicated support contract.
Keep Nortel platform - One of the options is to add on to their current environment for the short term, keeping the Nortel environment, and deal with longer term impact and risk. We don’t believe this is a prudent alternative for any company, particularly with the reduction in the telecom work force over the past few years.
Avaya-Nortel roadmap shows no clear path to UC in the contact center
By Barney Beal, News Director
21 Jan 2010 | SearchCRM.com
Avaya this week outlined its product roadmap for integrating the technology of Nortel Networks, but while both companies had unified communications (UC) and contact center technology, the combined technology is unlikely to bring the two closer together.
"Avaya's roadmap announcements, while touching on UC quite often, seemed likely to shift the debate more towards the role of SIP," Ian Jacobs, senior analyst at Ovum, wrote in an email interview. "Avaya had already been throwing development resources into making SIP the heart of its contact center routing and applications story (as well as the heart of its broader enterprise communications play); this roadmap puts SIP front and center as the core of future development and of the migration path for Nortel technology and customers."
The combination of two legacy channels, however, means several changes and plenty of training. Here are the 10 things to know about the Avaya-Nortel road map, Avaya's channel ambitions, and what questions about its services, distributors and other market segments still remain.
Less than 30 days since it closed its US$915 million acquisition of the enterprise solutions business of Nortel Networks, Avaya Inc. on Tuesday announced its roadmap for integrating the Nortel portfolio into Avaya's going-forward.
In what executives from Avaya are calling a blending of the best of both companies, a number of Nortel technologies and offerings will be integrated into Avaya's, some playing key roles. For partners, perhaps the most notable changes occur on the services side, where Avaya is implementing an annuity model it described as more “industry-standard.” Warranties will move from 12 months to three months, and Nortel partners will be onboarded into the new Avaya Connect partner program beginning in April.
The tech road-map explained
Visit the link below for the complete article:
www.itbusiness.ca/it/client/en/CDN/News.asp?id=56106
Posted by Sheila McGee-Smith, McGee-Smith Analytics | Jan 19, 2010
The story of the day is the roadmap launched today by Avaya to explain its plan for rationalizing the Avaya and Nortel voice portfolios. I'm sure that there will be a number of stories written for No Jitter; as is my wont, here I will highlight the contact center angle on the announcements.
The market actually saw a glimmer of today's Avaya Contact Center strategy back in November, during SVP Alan Baratz's keynote address at VoiceCon San Francisco. During that speech, Baratz previewed the Next Generation Contact Center (NGCC) Architecture. He re-visited that topic on today's analyst/press call.
Network World - Avaya is now the undisputedly largest unified communications vendor, but its purchase of Nortel's enterprise business has dropped the company's investment rating to junk status, according to Moody's Investors Service.
The ranking for the privately held company was dropped to B3 – six steps below the lowest rating that is considered investor grade, according to the Wall Street Journal. The rating is an assessment of how credit worthy entities are.
A B3 ranking is marked by subject "high credit risk", and having "generally poor credit quality," and is among the rankings commonly referred to as junk.